Friday, July 31, 2015

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I remember one time years ago when our area had a garbage strike. (It's not a great memory!) The garbage piled up in our garage while the sanitation folks figured out their deal, and it took a while. And it took awhile to get the smell out of our garage.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

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Since we're not all military types, it's probably good to explain what a beachhead is before we talk about one. A beachhead is not where the beach begins. And it's not a guy who just thinks about getting to the beach all the time. In wartime, a beachhead is pretty serious business. It's a small piece of ground that you try to take as your first step in taking all the ground that your enemy holds.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

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My friend Jim loves to wear this shirt that says, "I've been to the wilderness". That's what it says on the front. On the back it says, "I can handle anything." Sounds a little cocky maybe, but he did earn the right to wear the shirt. He went out on a two-week wilderness program where they pushed him, and all those on the trip, to go way beyond their limitations. Running for miles, climbing for hours with a heavy backpack, living off the land, blazing trails, enduring the heat, going solo for two days with almost nothing to live on. Hard? Yes. Fun? Not particularly. Worth it? Ask Jim. Or, better yet, read his shirt. "I've been to the wilderness. I can handle anything!"

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

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Man, did my wife and I grow up in two different worlds! While I was growing up in a little apartment on the South Side of Chicago, my future wife was living in the Ozarks in a tarpaper cabin, wallpapered with Montgomery Ward catalog pages to keep out the winter wind. They called that area "Trail's End", and it was. When her Dad got out of the service, his parents gave him some land where he literally bulldozed a road and then a lot out of the woods. I think my wife's early years sound a little like something out of Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Waltons, the old TV show.

Monday, July 27, 2015

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It used to be a lot simpler to take out the garbage. The only decision we had to make that day was to take it to the curb. Not so much anymore! Now you've got to make sure you don't put out any grass clippings or limbs with your regular trash. We recycle everything! And those items are supposed to be separated. When we lived in the Metropolitan New York area their rules about garbage disposal were even more complicated. My friend Craig had recently moved there and wasn't familiar with the regulations. He let his garbage pile up for the first few weeks with odoriferous results. He finally found the instructions on handling trash and he told me, "It wasn't that I didn't want to get rid of that garbage, I just didn't know how to."

Friday, July 24, 2015

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Sherry's family, who she loves very much, they live in Minnesota, and that's where Sherry lived. She had a home church and a place to work until she decided to move to Arizona. Why, you ask? Why would a young woman to-tally relocate her life to a place where she doesn't have a job and doesn't know many people? One reason: my youngest son. She was about to be his serious girlfriend. And Arizona would just happen to be where our son lived. He worked with Native American young people there. And it should come as no surprise that she wanted to be where the man she loves was. She rearrang-ed her whole life to be with him, and now she's our daughter-in-law!

Thursday, July 23, 2015

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When Princess Diana died no one could have ever predicted the massive public outpouring of love and grief that came from the British people in the week following her death. Maybe you remember that sea of flowers that enveloped the front of Buckingham Palace and Diana's personal residence at Kensington Palace. You couldn't get anywhere near the gates. The flowers seemed to stretch out endlessly! Someone who had been close to the Princess said, "Diana had no idea she was loved like this." That's sad but not unique.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

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It was a wonderful letter I received from Mark, who was a teenager in one of my Campus Life Clubs a looong time ago. He was reflecting on those high school years and his summer job as a lifeguard. I'll just quote from his letter, "Lots of city folk who couldn't swim came out to our beach, and we went in many, many times for them. I was paranoid that I would lose someone on my watch and we never did." Then he went on to describe another nearby beach as a place "where suburban trained swimmers go. They did lose a child when no one else was looking."

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

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Dino and Nanette are dear Navajo friends of ours and then they became Mr. and Mrs.! Oh, we wanted to be at their wedding because they are two very special friends, very special Native American Christian leaders. We couldn't be there, but our son attended, and that afternoon he described the wedding to us, as well as any man can describe a wedding. I choked up when I heard about their wedding vows. Dino made his vows to Nanette on bended knee. Nanette made her vows to Dino and then handed him a beautiful Navajo blanket. But this wasn't just any blanket. It had belonged to her father who died several years ago and it represented a relationship and memories that she really treasures. That blanket was Nanette's father's love gift to her. And in this moment of commitment, she was handing her new husband this most precious treasure from her most precious person. I guess in a sense, she was handing him her heart.

Monday, July 20, 2015

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I had a busy schedule of speaking in the Chicago area that week. But I had one night free. It happened to be during what they call Founder's Week. That's the annual conference that commemorates the birthday of the founder of Moody Bible Institute, D.L. Moody. When I heard that one of my favorite speakers was there that night, I told my wife I wanted to attend. And we did, along with some of our ministry team members.